Can’t view some web pages

I have a T1 connection to the internet and I use IE 5.5 as my browser. I have run into several web pages that I cannot view. The browser will lock and I must do a CTRL ALT DEL to close the browser because it is not responding. After contacting one of the web developers who created one of the pages with which I was having a problem, he told me that his page contained background graphics nested in tables and that was why I was not able to view the page. Since other users can view these pages, is there something I can change on my computer so that I can view background graphics nested in tables (without asking the programmers to re-do their pages!).